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Taking a spin in the last gasp of a legendary manufacturer, one of two ever made.
UPDATE 8/27/2018: We drove this car in 2016. The next time we saw it—at the Gooding & Company sale in Monterey, California, in August 2018—it hammered sold for $22 million, making history not only as the most expensive American car sold at auction but also as the priciest prewar car ever sold at auction. We have added some photos from its auction listing to our original photo gallery from November 2016.
Starting the 1935 Duesenberg SSJ’s engine is a rather complex process: Pull out the metal organ-stop choke from the hand-engine-turned metal dashboard; turn the tiny brass key clockwise one detent; retard the spark with one of the beaded metal sliders on the black Bakelite steering wheel; lightly press the giant shoe-shaped throttle pedal; and yank on the cable-actuated knurled starter knob until it almost collides with the S-shaped floor shifter that’s topped by a black doorknob.
It’s clear when the engine catches. The 7.3-liter, twin-carbureted, dual-overhead-cam, 32-valve, centrifugally supercharged, Indianapolis-bred straight-eight engine does not howl or roar. Instead, it emits a potent yet understated susurration, like a cauldron of molten gold in the moment before it boils.
“The thing about a Duesenberg SSJ,” says the car’s owner, Miles Collier, as if there is only one thing, “is that it’s an entirely different animal from the J or SJ,” the lesser Duesenberg models from which this legendary roadster derives. “It’s an extremely charismatic product,” he says.
That is an understatement. The car is searing and imperious. If I had been in the driver’s seat any longer, I certainly would have become a cult leader.
Taking two feet out of the wheelbase and adding a second carburetor, a pair of ram’s-horn air-inlet ports, and a custom lightweight body totally transformed the somewhat outdated Duesy’s abilities. The J and SJ were quick yet stately. But shortening the chassis for the SSJ tightened the ride, handling, and braking capabilities.
“Still,” says Collier, “it’s really the straight-line power of this thing that is most impressive. Back in the day, with a purported 400 horsepower—twice as much as anything else on the market—it was like it landed from outer space. It made mincemeat out of anything else on the road.” Sixty miles per hour was reached in less than eight seconds, which is quicker than a late-1970s Ferrari 308GTB.
Getting all that power to the road is no simple task, especially when the road in question is one of the narrow lanes that run around a recently hurricane-devastated barrier island. We’re piloting the big Duesenberg during South Carolina’s premier classic-car event, the Hilton Head Island Concours d’Elegance. Piles of fallen oak branches line the streets like grasping hedgerows, and the oncoming traffic consists mainly of other priceless classics or distracted rental-car drivers gawking at them.
The clutch is light, but engagement is at the very top of the pedal’s long travel, a physical point at which my knee nudges the bottom left of the steering wheel. The three-speed transmission has a well-oiled heft, like a used cement mixer’s flow-control shaft, and it is a non-synchro design with an asymmetrical dogleg H-pattern. Reverse is up top to the left, while first is way down below it almost in the seat cushion. Second is a stretch up to the right, banging the stick against the dash, and third feels barely an inch below that. Engagement is usually accompanied by an expensive-sounding grinding. The steering wheel has a circumference roughly equal to the equator’s, and the tires it directs feel approximately a football field ahead of the chopped windscreen, broadcasting little through their narrow and distant contact patches except news that occurred 300 feet ago. The drum brakes have only the slightest capacity to bear down on the inertial inevitability of more than 5000 pounds of irreplaceable metal; full stops must be telegraphed ahead to the next station.
“The thing it’s closest to driving in comparison,” Collier says, “is a live-axle C1 Corvette. With leaky shocks and blown brakes.”
But the allure of a car like this is not in how it drives—it’s in the opportunity to drive it. And sweet baby Jesus, is it glorious. I have to bury my foot deep into the gas pedal’s travel before the boost gauge to the left of the wheel moves off zero, but when I do, the rush is literally transporting. Unlike almost any other classic, the Duesy actually accelerates, and it feels disinclined to give up doing so, pretty much forever. The moon-needled, white-faced speedometer goes to 150 mph. The altimeter goes to heaven. The grin on my face goes to my earlobes.
“These cars were the last gasp of the Duesenberg factory, as it died during the Depression,” Collier says. With national unemployment cresting 30 percent and a product lineup reaching obsolescence, the bankers, industrialists, and royals who were once at the brand’s core had lost both the capacity for and interest in status objects this ostentatious. One place where demand still existed: Hollywood. “And demand,” Collier continues, “was two.” The car I drove belonged to screen star Gary Cooper. When his friend Clark Gable saw it, Gable persuaded the local Duesenberg dealer into loaning the other to him.
Collier came into possession of the Cooper car when he purchased the Briggs Cunningham collection as part of the exquisite Collier Collection at his REVS Institute, a museum and archive for studying the history of the automobile as it relates to the present and future: the car as a lens for interrogating modernity. “The automobile was an early form of disruptive technology,” he says. “And its longevity affords us an opportunity to look at how a disruptive technology works over the course of 100 years, as a salvation, as a scourge, and as everything in between.”
My first point of entry into nearly half a century of automotive obsession, as a precocious eight-year-old, was through an affection for great cars of the classic era. Duesenbergs were my apex totem—a dream, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, rendered in outrageous color; a contrast to the earth-toned drudgery of my Malaise Era youth. When I was bar mitzvahed, my cake was in the shape of a supercharged Duesenberg. But even in frosting, an SSJ roadster was beyond my ken. My tween-age brain could conjure only a formal, gray SJ Rollston coupe. In its flames, I saw the promise of truth embedded in all great fantasies. If you make a wish and blow out the candles, one day that wish might come true.